On Sunday, HBO Max confirmed that a Sex and the City reboot called And Just Like That… is officially in the works—an announcement that inspired fervent speculation among fans and critics. (Not least because the show is, tragically, down one lead: Kim Cattrall’s Samantha.) The original series was famously candid, and often clever, as it followed four friends—Samantha, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda, and Kristin Davis’s Charlotte—snappily discussing the details of their sex lives, dating preferences, and personal aspirations. But its quippy, city-girl tone has aged unevenly. Though that approach was well-suited to a story about proudly imperfect women, the show also used it as a cheap excuse to center a very specific viewpoint: straight white affluence, as written by straight white women and gay white men.
For those who still watch the original series whenever they’ve got five hours to waste away on the couch, it’s not hard to acknowledge its wrongheadedness while enjoying its tenacity and extreme watchability. Much like its descendant Girls, SATC drilled into even the most sharply critical millennials that it may be useless to try to untangle those characteristics—and anyway, it’s all just television, right? Who doesn’t enjoy an elevated mess?
News of a reboot, though, invites us to reconsider the show’s tone and ideas—and often, Sex and the City’s jibes took the form of homophobia and transphobia. Throughout the course of the series, Samantha gleefully used a transphobic slur in a dig against sex workers; Carrie doubted the validity of bisexual men; in more than one episode, lesbians were portrayed as exclusively white, rich, and power-hungry. Stanford (Willie Garson), Carrie’s token gay male friend, was more of an accessory than a person; in the second Sex and the City movie, he ended up marrying the franchise’s only other gay male regular, even though his future husband once chastised his friend Charlotte for assuming he’d even be interested in Stanford. (“Why, because he’s gay and I’m gay?” Mario Cantone’s Anthony asked in season four. “Charlotte, let me clear something up for you…I could do a lot better.”)
Even when Samantha, the most sexually adventurous of the bunch, dated a woman (played by the beloved Brazilian actor Sônia Braga), Sex and the City fumbled. The show used lesbianism as a narrative device, painting it as a strategy born out of dating fatigue; the possibility that Samantha was legitimately curious or bisexual was never explored. Her friends’ sly, self-centered commentary about her new relationship—that Samantha was simply in a phase, that she was doing this for attention—was framed not as gossip, but insight.
To those outside of queer communities, such a reading may come as a surprise; how could Sex and the City get gay people so wrong? How could its openly gay writers—primarily creator Darren Star and executive producer Michael Patrick King—sorely misrepresent a group they’re a part of?
But it’s old news to note that (usually upper-class) white gay men have a deserved reputation for taking conservative and even bigoted positions about their trans, Black, lesbian, or fat brethren, acting as if a mix of self-hatred and disdain of the Other is a charming personality trait. Accordingly, Sex and the City’s most reactionary perspectives are never portrayed as a source of shame for the characters or their acquaintances; they’re always meant as light entertainment. Similarly, straight white women—like the bulk of Sex and the City’s writers—can often act as accomplices and avatars for this exclusion. In many ways, Sex and the City used the much-stereotyped dynamic of friendship between straight white women and gay men to prop up self-assuredly ignorant worldviews.
It’s this age-old mix of gay patriarchy and white supremacy that adds a layer of trepidation to anyone anticipating HBO’s limited-series revival of the show. Star, now helming the popularly hate-watched Emily in Paris, is out, while King, who wrote and directed SATC’s critically maligned but lucrative film sequels, is in. Star and King worked alongside each other for years on the original series; in the interim, King produced the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which received criticism for blatant racism. The skill it will take to issue a reboot that is self-aware without being self-conscious requires more than experience or self-help revelations—imagination is essential.
But And Just Like That… will be a fresh creation, existing firmly in the present—a present where, for example, Cynthia Nixon is now married to a woman and the mother to a trans child. It’s unlikely that she, at least, would sign onto And Just Like That… if its scripts were as cavalier about queer issues as the original series so often was. Could a reprisal force King to examine how his characters’ flaws were often rooted in an anti-queer mentality? Or will the new series simply paper over the show’s history by making Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte paragons of midlife emotional and moral growth? Perhaps, in the end, our fan fiction about a lesbian New York governor Miranda Hobbes could come to fruition—as an audience-pandering plot that atones for Sex and the City’s past sins.
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